Its current government may be insular, but here was a reminder that culturally Hungary has long looked outwards. Three of the defining composers of the last century were or are Hungarian: Béla Bartók, György Ligeti and György Kurtág, who turns 93 this month and had a major opera premiered at La Scala only a few months ago. Devised by Gerard McBurney, the Barbican’s Hungariana – a day of three concerts in the relatively intimate setting of Milton Court – was both a celebration of their music and an attempt to explore what its Hungarianness might look like.
Each concert presented works by all three composers – mostly early ones, rooted in Hungary rather than bearing the weight of exile. The spotlight was shared between the Casals Quartet and pianist Tamara Stefanovich. McBurney himself, reading by Anglepoise lamp, preceded each work with reminiscences from the composers’ writings, and with snippets from poets and novelists including Endre Ady and Attila József. The poetry came at us in Hungarian, recorded, then in rather prosaic translation.
The visuals were courtesy of Amelia Kosminsky, who had harvested an archive of Hungarian amateur photography and whose black-and-white overlaid images merged and shifted on the screen overhead like well-thumbed postcards of quotidian life. From scenes of nature and peasant farmwork during Bartók’s 14 piano Bagatelles to urban nightscapes in Ligeti’s first string quartet, Métamorphoses Nocturnes, these provided new contexts, but sometimes at other aspects’ expense. For example, with the house lights down and no titles on the screen, Stefanovich’s sparky selections from Kurtág’s Játékok, his huge collection of brief musical “games”, was shorn of the humour and tension of their wordplay.
In the afternoon concert, Stefanovich shone in seven of Ligeti’s Études, nonchalantly dispatching crazily fast, mechanical writing that nods to Conlon Nancarrow, or painting in Debussy-like watercolours; Bartók and his successors went out and collected music not only in the fields of Transylvania but in the sophisticated salons of Paris. As for the Casals Quartet, their performances of Bartók’s Quartet No. 3 and Ligeti’s Métamorphoses Nocturnes were impeccable: polished, spicy-sweet and bristling with spirit.
